Interviewed in the October 2011 issue of Uncut, Peter Gabriel said that the only
compromise he made in the making of his fifth solo album was to agree with
Peter Saville’s notion for a vaguely romantic and moody monochrome cover pose
(although the cover shot was actually taken by Trevor Key, who once
photographed the cover of Tubular Bells)
since he was told that “my usual obscure LP sleeves alienated women.”

Now he certainly had less to worry about in that department
than Phil Collins, whose records were mostly bought and listened to by
lachrymose, drunken middle-aged male divorcees in wine bars. If you look at the
cover of So, however, and temporarily
mistake it for an album by, say, Richard Marx, you are not going to be wholly
convinced by listening to it that it’s not.

This business of updating images and making them appear modern is a recurring feature in TPL 1986. If 1986 was indeed “the year
that saved music,” when there was something new and different to hear and/or
see practically every day, let alone every week, then how come most of its
non-compilation number one albums are by familiar figures from the seventies,
or, in one case, the sixties? Given that the album chart has an
already-demonstrated tendency to think and move at the speed of a dinosaur –
and given the crop of new names who do turn up in TPL 1987 – one might regard this as inevitable. But it also
suggests something more sinister; that contemporary consumers just want the
same old music by the same old people, tarted up here and there to make it seem
of the now and relevant.

So, typically, is
probably 1986’s most complex instance of this tendency, and again it beats No Jacket Required hands down; whereas
Collins’ idea of communication is to stand on the lawn in the pouring rain at
two-thirty in the morning, sobbing in self-pity, Gabriel is more concerned
about the problems inherent in communicating with other people; many of So’s songs involve a second voice, or at
least the acknowledgement of a second voice, even if, as in “That Voice Again,”
it’s the discouraging voice of his parents or teachers that he remembers from
childhood and stops him from listening in the present tense (hence it is a
natural follow-up to “Don’t Give Up,” with the latter’s “I was taught to fight,
taught to win”). If the album had ended, as originally planned, with “In Your
Eyes” – different from the George Benson song, and in the States the “Our Tune”
of thousands – there would also have been a clearer hope, instead of the
troublesome way in which the album does
end.

But where Peter Gabriel 3 was a dark and densely challenging record which reluctantly let
in the world at its close, So stands
in the light and wonders, half-apologetically, whether it’s all worth it. “Red
Rain” – about a nightmare Gabriel had involving bottles of wine – has a clear
subtext of global trouble (and a more specific one of South African apartheid),
but apart from his extreme vocal similarity to the Blue Nile’s Paul Buchanan in
the choruses, the song does not really connect, despite (or perhaps because of)
the presence of three worlds of drums (Jerry Marotta’s kit, Chris Hughes’ Linn
programming and Stewart Copeland’s onomatopoeic hi-hat). The music sounds
expensive, meticulously tailored and finally uninvolving; Daniel Lanois
co-produces throughout, but I do not really think that there is much palpable
evidence of his touch here, other than the semi-spoken need to break through to
a North American audience; in fact Lanois had worked with Gabriel on his Birdy soundtrack in 1984, and along with
old faithful David Rhodes, the three worked up songs and rhythms – Lanois dealt
with Gabriel’s famously procrastinatory approach to lyric-writing by locking
him in his room until he had finished the lyric.

“Sledgehammer” was the probable main reason why So is in this tale, and it remains
debatable whether it’s a sellout or pop’s best compendium of John Thomas
analogies. Certainly reading the lyric is rather like scanning the storyboard
of its video, as if the latter were in the singer’s head before the song, but actually
Gabriel intended the song as a comparatively lighthearted tribute to Otis
Redding; it was seeing the latter on stage at the Ram Jam Club in Stockwell –
390 Brixton Road, to be precise - back in 1966 that convinced the teenage
Charterhouse pupil Gabriel that he should pursue a career in music.
Furthermore, Gabriel contacted Wayne Jackson, Redding’s original trumpeter, who
then reconvened the Memphis Horns to back the singer on both “Sledgehammer” and
“Big Time.” “Sledgehammer” is either a brilliant act of subversion on horny
man-pop or Steve Winwood on steroids; I still can’t decide which.

Although it is hard to imagine anyone other than Kate Bush
singing the female counterpart on “Don’t Give Up,” Gabriel initially had a
Nashville country ballad framework in mind, and his first choice of co-singer
was Dolly Parton. She, wisely, turned it down, and the episode indicates that
Gabriel perhaps did not have a clear idea of what he wanted with this record.
Nonetheless, I agree with Dave Marsh that it is equally hard to imagine this
song being conceived or performed by an American; there is a characteristically
British (or English, anyway) air of weary acceptance about both Gabriel’s lyric
and performance; he is stoical, steadfastly refuses to blame anybody outright
or sink into self-pity. But his pain remains apparent, and when he approaches
the bridge he is clearly in two minds about whether or not to jump.

In which case, Bush’s warm reassurances are the only real
response to his internalised agony; she is gentle but insistent, she reminds
him that there are others, that when he thinks “I can’t take any more” it is
like saying “God, I can’t do this any more” and she has to tell him, over and
over, that he is not alone. But there is the ghost of that old Then Play Long stalwart, “My Elusive
Dreams”; they wander from town to town, don’t really find what they’re looking
for. But then again, nobody dies…yet (the harmonically ambiguous figure played
by Richard Tee’s electric piano and Tony Levin’s bass towards the end suggests
that danger has not been averted).

As mentioned above, “In Your Eyes” perhaps would have closed
a happier So, since it is about the
only instance on the record where Gabriel is unquestionably, and without
qualification, happy; he can barely stand for his awe (“I see the doorway to a
thousand churches”) and so has to rely on his backing singers (one of whom is Jim
Kerr) for support. Youssou N’dour’s ecstatic Wolof scatting entry at the end is
mixed too low, but like “Biko,” the world can now be approached without much in
the way of doubt or uncertainty.

But then side two continues with “Mercy Street,” a quiet,
hesitant meditation on the life of Massachusetts poet Anne Sexton, who took her
own life at the beginning of October 1974, aged forty-five, which bears, I
suspect, more than a hint of the pain evident in her posthumous collection The Awful Rowing Towards God (“Let’s
take the boat out”); I wonder if Sexton’s late sixties jazz-rock/poetry group Her
Kind ever made any recordings, and what a fifty-three-year-old Plath might have
made of observations like “Pulling out the papers from drawers that slide
smooth/Tugging at the darkness, word upon word.” The confession box, the
forbidden kisses, the mercy, “nowhere in the suburbs/in the cold light of day.”

Then Stewart Copeland offers a cheery “Hi there!” and “Big
Time” smashes into existence, an exercise in free enterprise irony as clear and
subject to misreadings as “Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots Of Money).” Gabriel
has said that the song was intended as a satire and a cloak for his doubt
whether he really wanted to be that
famous. On close reading and listening, I can’t see how the song could be taken
as anything other than ironic (and a less-than-subtle extension of the central
penile metaphor of “Sledgehammer”), but that thwacking beat – so similar to “Land
Of Confusion” – was persuasive, and the promises sounded tempting to those
young conservatives who chose to bang the song around their Porsche speakers
and not listen at all closely. On the other hand, however, one could interpret
the song, with all its Hammond organ and PP Arnold contributions, as a prequel
to “Don’t Give Up” – it’s the Mod sixties, and young Peter is dying to escape
the “small town” where he comes from and make it in the “big city”; “Don’t Give
Up” is what happens a generation later when the hope runs dry (a similar London
de-evolutionary process via the pop song could be conducted, starting with Des
O’Connor/Jim Dale’s idiotically optimistic “Dick-A-Dum-Dum (King’s Road)” and
culminating in Brian Protheroe’s terminal “Pinball.” The protagonists of both
songs are incurably, and wilfully, alone).

But then, with a subtle start, comes the reminder that we
are listening to a Peter Gabriel album. The original LP actually ends with “We
Do What We’re Told”; the background to Professor Stanley Milgram’s experiments
is outlined here. Music and voices are bitonal, robotic, nightmarish; OK Computer finds another potential
starting point, and the closing chant of “one doubt/one voice/one war/one
truth/one dream” can usefully be borne in mind when considering #331 (and the “one
doubt” will end up corroding that record). It is as if Gabriel has already seen
the future, and knows that it is not worth having.

However, the record (first generation CD copy) now ends
with, of all kindred spirits, a perky Laurie Anderson; Gabriel guested on her
original “Excellent Birds” (which is to be found on 1984’s superb Mister Heartbreak) and here blended it
with his own observations; he sees “pictures of people, rising up…/falling down”
and actually he is not that pessimistic – he sees that change is coming and can
happen. “When I see the future,” he says, “I close my eyes.” The supporting
cast includes Manu Katche, Tony Levin, L Shankar, Bill Laswell, Larry Klein and
Nile Rodgers. The music, as a whole, does not live up to these promises; there
is the mid-eighties disease of politesse,
of restraint as emotional muffler, at the use of what was then just beginning to
be called world music as a panacea rather than the key to another universe. Gabriel did not wish to be pinned down to promises of “Sledgehammer 2”; his next,
non-soundtrack album would not appear until 1992, and he would never again be
as big - in the "Big Time" sense - as he had been in 1986. Yet his approach might be one of double-bluff; yes, I
look and sound smoother, but don’t be fooled, and how long have you got to find
out, and whom do you please if you can’t, or won’t, please everyone?

Next: “Though I saw it all around/Never thought that I’d be
affected.”

2 comments:

Good post. Singles apart, I've only ever heard this album once, when someone gave me a vinyl copy they'd duplicated by mistake, and I enjoyed it. Going to see Gabriel for the first time in 41 years in November, so useful to know about the Laurie Anderson track, which he evidently now plays at the end of 'SO', which he'll be doing in full. I first heard 'Mercy Street' in Elbow's version & it was immediately apparent how much of their whole shtick they've taken from Lamb Lies Down and post-Genesis Gabriel.

Excellent review. This is my favourite album so I hope I can be allowed a longish comment.

It starts with the cover, where Gabriel (as you say) seems to be following Phil in discovering the value of his face. But it’s hard to believe he protested too much when so much of the album is about discarding pretence, breaking down barriers and (re)joining – ‘I want to be with you, I want to be clear’; ‘shed my skin’, ‘grand façade… will burn’, ‘I come back to the place you are’, etc.

The album’s unique sound turns on the contrast between a natural, organic feel and an insanely atomic means of production, splicing together individual bars from dozens of live performances. But as you note, the meticulously polished fragments don’t always come together into a coherent whole.

‘Red Rain’ is an elemental ‘big music’ metaphor that wouldn’t have shamed U2, but the blustering emotional impact soon gives way to doubt over who is actually speaking, and what they are actually on about. (I later learned that it’s about therapy.)

‘Sledgehammer’ is Gabriel ‘doing’ 60s soul, which I hadn’t heard much of when I first heard his version. Like most pastiches, the biggest triumph it can hope for is technical rather than expressive, and even ardent fans probably wouldn’t name it as a fave. Lyrically, PG is hiding a confession (‘I do actually like sex’) in a shell of genre cliché, like Lennon admitting/undermining his sadness through C&W in ‘Misery’.

‘Don’t Give Up’ is a song I’ve always felt I should be more affected by. Maybe it’s because we’d already heard this chalk-and-chalk combination of voices on the arch and angular ‘Games Without Frontiers’. Most of the emotional heavy lifting is done by the intricate, brooding bass and that luminous sprig of piano. Lyrically, PG fails to convince in persona as an unemployed labourer. Contrast this with the devastating results when the relatively street Mark Hollis, on ‘I Believe In You’, observes drug addiction with sympathy (‘I’ve seen heroin for myself’) rather than presuming to inhabit the soul of the addict.

As you’ve noted elsewhere, The Blue Nile (who Gabriel deeply admired, for their pace of work as well as their music) give each album an emotional kernel where the true heart of the record reveals itself. On ‘So’, it’s the two central tracks ‘That Voice Again’/’In Your Eyes’ (in the original vinyl running order, which is the only one I can countenance).

‘That Voice Again’ harks back to the mental anguish of ‘Peter Gabriel 3’, but the tempestuous sound, buffeting the singer with gusts of doubt, means it doesn’t have the same confining internality. Apparently it was a big deal for PG to use a twelve-string, studiously avoided since Genesis. Actually, a lot of this record feels like someone finally allowing themselves something.

Presumably it’s on the verses of ‘In Your Eyes’ that we sail closest to Richard Marx territory. (If ‘Hazard’ weren’t so perfect, the comparison would be more painful.) As you say, in its straightforward joy it stands apart from most of his work, but there had been flashes of this sort of mood before (‘Humdrum’). Live, the fadeout was prolonged for minutes on end, giving a sense of unending carnival.

‘Mercy Street’, in its painstaking evocation of place and mood, is a bit of a throwback to ‘Peter Gabriel 4’. I’ve seen the sound described as ‘airbrushed’, but the atmosphere is spellbinding, even if the meaning remains obscure (unless you read the poems, perhaps).

‘Big Time’ is another infectious romp, although there’s something vaguely troubling about the way PG reaches for the funk when he wants to take the piss (‘The Barry Williams Show’). As with ‘Land Of Confusion’, the satire feels a bit limp and late.

On vinyl, the closer was ‘We Do What We’re Told’, drifting off very pleasingly into an ambiguous haze of doubt, despair and hope. ‘This Is The Picture’ is such an obvious B-side that I can’t understand why PG would want it on at all. Personally, I find the surprised-face artiness and plinky-plonk music just too silly.